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Adding Individual Cards to a FitsChan

To insert individual cards into a FitsChan, prior to reading them back as Objects for example, you should use the AST_PUTFITS routine. You can insert a card in front of the current one as follows:

      CALL AST_PUTFITS( FITSCHAN, CARD, .FALSE., STATUS )

where the third argument of .FALSE. indicates that the current card should not be overwritten. Note that facilities are not provided by AST for formatting the card contents.

After inserting a card, the FitsChan's Card attribute points at the original Card, or at the end-of-file if the FitsChan was originally empty. Entering a sequence of cards is therefore straightforward. If CARDS is an array of character strings containing FITS header cards and NCARDS is the number of cards, then a loop such as the following will insert the cards in sequence into a FitsChan:

      INTEGER NCARD
      CHARACTER * ( 80 ) CARDS( NCARD )

      ...

      DO 3 ICARD = 1, NCARD
         CALL AST_PUTFITS( FITSCHAN, CARDS( ICARD ), .FALSE., STATUS )
 3    CONTINUE

Note that AST_PUTFITS enforces the validity of a FitsChan by rejecting any cards which do not adhere to the FITS standard. If any such cards are detected, an error will result.


next up previous 264
Next: Adding Concatenated Cards to a FitsChan
Up: Storing AST Objects in FITS Headers (FitsChans)
Previous: The Native FitsChan Output Format

AST A Library for Handling World Coordinate Systems in Astronomy
Starlink User Note 210
R.F. Warren-Smith & D.S. Berry
24th May 2011
E-mail:ussc@star.rl.ac.uk

Copyright (C) 2009 Science \& Technology Facilities Council